Diane Abbott

Diane Abbott is the Shadow Secretary of State for Health. She was first elected as the Member of Parliament for Hackney North and Stoke Newington in 1987 general election, when she became the first Black Woman to have a seat in the House of Commons.

Diane Abbott

Diane Abbott

The UK is an ‘enabler of corruption’ and ‘the role of the UK as a centre of global money-laundering is widely acknowledged. There is considerable data. These are not the verdicts of some stereotypical anti-bank campaigner, intent on soaking the rich. They are the considered assessments of independent and widely respected experts Global Witness and Transparency International UK. The UK has a money laundering problem, and action is required to deal with it.

The mechanisms of global financial corruption and money laundering taint all those who come into contact with them. The biggest losers are primarily the populations of the least developed economies, where multi-national corporations, corrupt local agents, and sometimes governments work to plunder the wealth of the nation and enrich themselves. This can and has led to the generalised corruption of society in some instances.

The financial facilitators of this corruption are the banks or other major financial institutions, operating through a complex network of trusts, managers and personal wealth funds in a series of offshore tax havens. No great financial crime can be committed without them. A key conduit in this network are the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, who are subject to wholly inadequate regulation.

This was revealed in the publication of the ‘Panama Papers’. The release of the Panama Papers in April 2016, just prior to the London Anti-Corruption Summit, exposed the extent of tax evasion and tax avoidance through tax havens around the world. It also highlighted the UK’s involvement in such schemes. Approximately half of the companies, over 113,000 in total, which featured in the Mossack Fonseca files were registered in the British Virgin Islands, a UK Overseas Territory.

In addition, almost two–thousand UK-based intermediaries were revealed in the leaks, making the UK second only to Hong Kong for the number of facilitators of tax evasion and avoidance it hosts.

This has a detrimental impact on the financial system here too, with vast resources, time and personnel devoted to tax avoidance and to tax evasion, not to beneficial financial activity such as productive lending that would benefit the economy. Instead, there is the huge inflation of house prices especially in London in part funded by the proceeds of tax evasion and money laundering. The ordinary people of this country have a common cause with the ordinary people of some of the most deprived countries in the world. To different degrees, we all have an interest in ending this corruption.

Currently the Criminal Finances Bill is going through Parliament. Labour has tabled amendments with the aim of expanding the bill to include Britain’s tax havens. We hold the position that they should publish the names of the individuals behind the shell companies registered there.

In its current state the Bill is lax on tackling this major issue and needs to be strengthened significantly. The quasi-autonomous status of Overseas Territories cannot be a barrier to our role in tackling international money-laundering. We must face up to our responsibilities and end the UK’s role in this global scandal.

The Investigatory Powers Bill is likely to become law. Its powers are far too widely drawn and there are very few safeguards against the mass collection of data by a host of different government agencies, simply acting on suspicion of any crime, not even limited to terrorist or serious crime.

In Britain there has been a widespread delusion that we can be in, or have ‘full access to’ the EU Single Market while negotiating some sort of opt out from Freedom of Movement. In politics, as in life, it can be deadly to base your actions on wishful thinking.

­­­I was honoured this week to deliver my first speech to Labour Party Conference as Shadow Secretary of State for Health in order to highlight how the Tories’ ideologically-driven austerity agenda is risking the very future of our health service and public health more generally.

The recent impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff is extraordinary and received relatively little attention in the British media, until protests have taken place against the new President in the Olympics and Paralympics.

The Tory party decision to bring forward a vote on replacing Trident is rank hypocrisy. The referendum vote, which was billed as ‘getting our country back’ by the most unbridled of the Leave leaders. But replacing Trident is a colossal waste of money for non-independent weapons of mass destruction. It ties Britain even closer the US military. The US has not even had its Chilcot moment. Officially, its position is that nothing has gone wrong in Afghanistan, and in Iraq or elsewhere. And who knows what military adventures the next US President might embark on.

Another A&E in north London is under threat of closure. Earlier this year Inspectors gave North Middlesex Hospital until late August to make “significant improvements” to its A&E department after discovering that a third of patients were waiting for over four hours to be seen.

It seems bizarre but true- the Secretary of State for Health has no statutory responsible for the NHS under current legislation. The Tory efforts to undermine the NHS go so far as to remove the ‘National’ part of the NHS acronym.